curtains

Today I learned that the reason I couldn't sleep in the bedroom the last few nights is that I'm sensitive to the plastic vertical blinds in the window. They were fine before, but they offgas something fierce when the mid-May Arizona sun shines on them. A year ago when I suppose this very thing was happening, I was sleeping outside where you can hear the coyotes, so live and learn, right?

Anyway, those of you who aren't familiar with this kind of problem have likely never heard about the protocol for dealing with it, so here's the procedure once you've identified the culprit:

1. yank said culprit and put it in the garage as carefully as you can manage in case you ever need it again, even though you would really rather it disappeared in a puff of smoke.
2. determine the urgency with which the culprit must be replaced. If you can live without it, you're done. If not, like if the sun is streaming in your bedroom window and promising to turn the house into a sauna (already have one, thanks), you better do something about it.

The upshot here is that the two yards of heavy cotton I was supposed to make into the outer layer of my winter coat is hanging from twenty-three paper clips attached to the mechanism for the blinds. And here I thought my engineering skills were going to go to waste.